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“If the reporter stays very still and very quiet long enough, he might be able to catch them grooming one another.” [Darleen Click]

So states a commenter on Ann Althouse’s post about the Washington Post’s strained attempt at explaining all those [gasp!] American Flags!!1!1 [gasp! GASP!] flying in Moore, Oklahoma.

MOORE, Okla. — The first thing Kevin Gibson did after returning to his house, torn apart by a powerful tornado Monday, was pull an American flag and a temporary flagpole from the corner of his partially standing garage.

Neighbors forlornly picking through the rubbish of their lives stopped to watch Gibson’s nephew, Sean Pontius, stick the pole into the ground and hoist the Stars and Stripes.

The flag-raising seemed to hearten the neighbors, as if assuring them that they would emerge triumphant from this disaster.

With the remnants of their lives lying around them, Gibson recalled, the neighbors began applauding and chanting: “Yes, sir! Raise that flag!”

In many ravaged neighborhoods in this Oklahoma City suburb, where Monday’s tornado was its fiercest, American flags have been popping up amid the ruins. They are hung from skeletal trees denuded of leaves and bark, stuck in the doors of cars turned upside down and draped over pieces of twisted metal embedded in the ground.

The shot of red, white and blue flying in a landscape of ashen brown is startling and powerfully defiant, seeming to embody the mettle of the national anthem.

And if the tone of this reporter, one of trying to make sense of these embarrassing primates in fly-over country, is facepalm worthy, the commentary is far worse. A cesspool of derision, condescension and out-right hatred.

I defy any Leftist to find similar hate from Oklahomans directed at New Yorkers post-9/11.

While I would try to say to such commenters, “Have you no shame?” I know that in order to actually feel shame, one must operate from some minimal standard of decency.

And as we have seen time and again, those of the Left possess no decency.

Comments (195)

Darleen, the people of Oklahoma are not performing according to script. There is no wailing and gnashing of teeth and exclamations of “We lost everything! What are we going to do!” Instead, everyone is cleaning up and getting things done and getting on with their lives.

I saw the same thing happen in rural Pennsylvania when there was a natural disaster that destroyed an entire small town and received no national news, of course. The townspeople all said “It’s just stuff. We can always get more stuff. We’re happy no more lives were lost.” And they also had the nerve to thank God and fly flags.

Toby Keith, who grew up in Moore donates $1M.
Carrie Underwood who is an OK native donates $1M.
Various other country music artists who are OK natives donate large amounts of dollars.
Kevin Durant of the OKC Thunder donates $1M as do a number of other players.
Bob Stoops, head coach of the OU Sooners football team, spends the day with the displaced and along with his time and national exposure, donates a large amount of dollars.
OU students help clear trash and debris for at least a week.
David Boren, OU President, opens the dorms (vacant because the term is over) to the displaced, but less than 100 people cannot find friends or relatives to stay with and the shelters remain relatively empty.
Gov. Mary Fallon, tours the damage and is asked about mandatory storm shelters in private homes. She responds that the state of Oklahoma isn’t going to mandate any such thing. It is up to the homeowner, not the legislature.

And if the tone of this reporter, one of trying to make sense of these embarrassing primates in fly-over country, is facepalm worthy, the commentary is far worse. A cesspool of derision, condescension and out-right hatred.

Part of that is just the WaPo commentariat. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy — not even on Tattooine.

Gov. Mary Fallon, tours the damage and is asked about mandatory storm shelters in private homes. She responds that the state of Oklahoma isn’t going to mandate any such thing. It is up to the homeowner, not the legislature.

I’m not sure they ceased to be patriotic so much as it isn’t a dopey reflex after things such as tornadoes. You’d be just as likely to see this happen in a blue collar Democrat union town as in a white trash okie jesus community.

I’m not sure they ceased to be patriotic so much as it isn’t a dopey reflex after things such as tornadoes. You’d be just as likely to see this happen in a blue collar Democrat union town as in a white trash okie jesus community.

I’m sure you would. I’m just curious about whatever it is that deadens sentimental attachments to God and country in the professional classes.

I’m sure you would. I’m just curious about whatever it is that deadens sentimental attachments to God and country in the professional classes.

I couldn’t say, really. I’m a Catholic, and while I went to church every week out of habit, I think the psycho priests and nuns had pretty much beaten the jesus out of our parents, and whatever religiosity there was in the next generation was essentially a dead cat bounce. I’d imagine that’s less likely to be the case if you live in a 24/7 jesus environment. But my only real experience with that was when a born again gym teacher TRIED to give me – an A student and all-state athlete – a C in gym class for having a foul mouth. Otherwise, people tend to keep their pieholes shut about their faith, and I can’t say that I mind that at all.

As to patriotism, I’d imagine that smart and educated people don’t immediately transfer that sentiment to natural disasters. It’s kind of a leap in logic, really.

– Its also a great go-to self serving dellusion when you know down deep you have no redeeming qualities. This is also where the “bitter clinger” illiterative projection springs from. But in all cases it is no doubt generated from that same class envy when you don’t get picked for a side in dodge ball.

I participate rather infrequently on a board devoted to food and fine dining that is dominated by people who style themselves as smarter than the average bear. There have been several threads devoted to people being “offended” by restaurants that have any profession of Christian faith anywhere in their establishments. My answer is always “then don’t go there”. This usually devolves the whole conversation, in which I am no longer participating, to when it’s ‘okay’ for such displays to take place: Kosher delis? Yes. Soul Food restaurants? Yes. Kebab and Schwarma places? Yes. Chick-fil-A? No way.

Notice a trend? Jesus is just yucky. If only he were more scary and killy like Allah, maybe.

Do what I do, Leigh. Give it back. I’m probably the worst troll there is on NY Eater because I call people out on their stupidity non-stop. I’m sure I ruffle plenty of Jesus feathers around here, but I’m merciless there in defending the same. New Yorkers aren’t used to being challenged, so their brains are all in a state of atrophy.

Abe, my brother. I just knew you’d know they were NYers. I do let them have it whenever there’s a discussion about minimum wage and how a free market economy works. Man, are they stupid and have no idea how their utopian ideas are nothing short of disastrous. I helpfully explain this to them and then proceed to shoot their foolish arguments full of holes. For some reason this is acceptable, but calling them out about being bigoted assholes about religion and pointing out how organic farming does more harm than good, gets my comments deleted and stern warnings from the mods when the pussies who started the whole kerfuffle go squealing like little bitches to Mama.

Romans 1:22 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

- The Left has spent the last 50 years proving beyond doubt that they are the hopelessly doomed geekdom under class. Once the coming generations of youth get wise to the lack of upside in joining their ranks the stupidity will fade. All fads and fetishes have their cycles.

- ….and your friends even closer. Apparently all the ankle licking did not immunize the NYT from the scutiny of the Fourth Reich.

As a result of the intense scrutiny, the Times says some sources are starting to clam up:

Some officials are now declining to take calls from certain reporters, concerned that any contact may lead to investigation. Some complain of being taken from their offices to endure uncomfortable questioning. And the government officials typically must pay for lawyers themselves, unlike reporters for large news organizations whose companies provide legal representation.

– Which is, of course, the goal of the intimedation in the first place.

I love arguing with them dicentra, except that it is so predictable. You know how it is, since we live in Vast Nowherelandia our opinions are automatically met with derision. It doesn’t matter that you went to Cornell (the real one, not the ag school) and that I went to Duquesne, we are still obvious rubes with inferior educations.

Re: BYU and trash talking the faithful. I ran into the same thing at my undergrad, which was a small private Franciscan college with a convent on campus. The students routinely trash-talked the nuns and priests who were the bulk of the faculty. I didn’t find that to be the case so much at Duquesne, but perhaps that’s because I was in grad school and I had stopped listening to it by then. The priests had a rectory right at the end of the Quad and you saw them everywhere on campus although I never had any of them as teachers.

That’s funny about the More Enlightened Than Thou. I used to refer to a student-friendly part of town as Hipper Than Thou.

This is what the important people care about. You know I’m not important ‘cuz I don’t get it…

In less than a two minutes, the ad manages to annoy me on a several levels. First, it is yet another example of celebrities trying to get some precious PR goodness by associating their “image” with some kind of good cause. Instead of like, shutting up and helping people on the low, they rather get in front of a camera and tell regular people: “Hey! I’m a celebrity and I’ve got money, look at how great I am because I care about this latest Hollywood good cause trendy thing… And you’re selfish jerk for not caring!” […]

I guess that the no-toilet strike suits well these celebrities…Because they’re full of shit.

BYU and trash talking the faithful. I ran into the same thing at my undergrad

Actually, I didn’t. Both the faculty and student body at BYU didn’t question the Foundational Assumptions, because Brigham Young founded the university for the express purpose of providing education that starts with the assumption that the Restored Gospel is true and then goes from there. If you don’t buy those assumptions, you don’t want to attend a uni that does.

Usually. Three percent of the student body is non-Mormon. Some are Muslims who like the fact that BYU prohibits alcohol and doesn’t have co-ed housing for the unmarried. Women in hijab don’t get the stink-eye, because we get the concept of modesty even when the particulars differ from our own.

No, the most common conflicts on campus were when the students ran into rules they didn’t like and then screamed, “Free Agency! Why don’t you let us exercise free agency!”

Because, you spoiled little SoCal freak, BYU was established as The Place Where We Don’t Do X, not the place where anything goes.

Yeah, I know. My backhanded approach to a point about the genius of America and the American system. It’s the things we take for granted as a country, culture and civilisation, that have the greatest impact on humanity in general.

It’s a flag-flying part of the country, so it seems to me that getting the flag back up is a logical first step towards reclaiming some normalcy.

Yes, that and getting to work putting things where they should be. In other places, like New York and New Orleans for instance, instead of wasting their times with flags, they turn Washington and bleat.

Yes, even the ag school is politically correct, but it’s more likely than the academic side (except STEMS) to produce something useful to the world.

I knew a guy who helped develop a worm-specific virus at Cornell. Wasn’t a student or prof, just a researcher. They also have these great apple orchards with new varieties, and in the fall, you can buy gallon jugs of fresh-squeezed apple juice in various specialty blends.

Free market conservatism kills? Yes, that’s right…[T]here were no rules in Moore or anywhere else in Oklahoma mandating that buildings…have so-called “safe rooms” or underground shelters to protect people during a storm…

I’ve heard reports that the town’s building codes were changed after the ’99 tornado to require safe rooms in new construction, though what types of new construction I don’t know. That is, the requirements may have reached to public buildings and not private, or they may have reached to all. But to say blankly that there was nothing mandatory is probably simply false.

It would cost more to build a basement than the entire structure of a home here. There is nothing but bedrock after you dig down about 3 inches. We had to fill our yard with countless truckloads of fill dirt to get a lawn going. Our well is 400 feet deep, for instance and had to be drilled over a week to ten days by someone with an industrial strength drill.

Our house is on a concrete footing that sits the house up about three and half feet off the ground, so we have to hide with the spiders under there if it looks scarey out. We have electric light under there, which is great unless the power goes out. I’m grateful that the tornadoes don’t come here often since I’d hate to have a two storey house decide to flatten on us.

I don’t know if that’s true or if it’s an East Coast reporter getting ahead of himself. The children are usually herded into maintenance rooms for tornado drills. The walls are usually concrete block, but that’s just normal construction nothing special like a safe room or a basement.

A safe room in a public school can run the district as much as $1M dollars. That’s generally about what is budgeted to pay the entire teaching and support staff for one year.

Here’s a friendly geological scheme of Oklahoma. Looks like Moore is in what’s termed there a Quarternary zone, which in general sounds like it’s mostly newish deposits (1.75 million yr old) formed along watercourses.

Funny that you mention it, when I mentioned the teaparty protesting IRS the cab driver immediately went into Democrat activist mode and explained himself pridefully, “See, I don’t listen to NUTH’N no Republican says. Never.” Which told me right off he’s a retard.

So I said, “I’ll try not to hold that against you. The affliction doesn’t go to your driving, does it?”

See, I’m just so amusing in real life. “Funny that epistimic closure narrows the discussion considerably.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s funny too. It’s something Liberals talk about always because they get to use the word epistimic, but it’s what they demonstrate by doing themselves. They do it, as you do, and project it onto Republicans. Conservatives do not talk about epistimic closure except to remark that liberals are talking about them again.”

Search “epistimic” and it will come up somewhere on the blue column of pol.url and if it is in the red then it points back to the blue.

And then I thought, “Let’s go to Chic-Fil-A, ” and then I thought, no, I can do better myself and it’s not worth it just to see. But I could have coaxed the cabbie into it I think if I paid for him too.

He said “they’re all rich. They just want to get out of paying taxes.”

And I said, “Nonsense. They’re all Walmart shoppers. You are richer than they.” I just made up that part to throw him off.

Then at home I did check out the menu and it looks like it totally sucks. It’s all chicken sandwiches and picnic type slaw things. You can’t even get regular fried chicken, just nuggets and such. Fuck that, man, there are some really good places to get meals around here.

AHA! That’s what the professional classes do! working class blue collar union schlubs and god botherers put out flags. Their so-called betters petition for new laws.

I’m not sure where the “so-called” comes from, but maybe it’s just a coincidence that the people here choose to camp out at blog run by a smart and well-edumacated wingnut. Where be the really smart Oklahoma political blogs? They’re free to start up, ya know?

They certainly run a government that we’d find preferable. They have a good college football program too. Doesn’t change the fact that they’re entirely useless in the war of ideas, though. That’s pretty much true of most Republican states, really. It gets a little tedious when the right has to depend on people from the states that most conservatives hate to do all of the cerebral work. Are there influential thinkers and bloggers out there from places like Oklahoma that I’m not aware of?

That’s true if you’re pleased with the direction of the country I guess, Pablo. I have plenty of money and am happy with my station in life, so I really don’t need to give a fuck about any of this. Maybe I should just make popcorn and learn to enjoy your haplessness.

“In utopia, rule by masterminds is both necessary and necessarily primitive, for it excludes so much that is known to man and about man. The mastermind is driven by his own boundless conceit and delusional aspirations, which he self-identifies as a noble calling. He alone is uniquely qualified to carry out this mission. He is, in his own mind, a savior of mankind, if only man will bend to his own will. Such can be the addiction of power. It can be an irrationally egoistic and absurdly frivolous passion that engulfs even sensible people. In this, mastermind suffers from a psychosis of sorts and endeavors to substitute his own ambitions for the individual ambitions of millions of people.”

Mark Levin might be one, for instance, exhibiting as he does a kind of excellence in his work and a persuasive argument along with his passion. Does he accept driveling mediocrity? No, he does not. Does his exhibition of excellence make him a “mastermind”? No, it does not.

- I must admit I’m a bit bemused by the “discussion” between Abe and Pablo. For me its flyshit and pepper. Other than loving friends and immediate family, growing and living life together with all its travails, and high points, and generally doing what we can to help each other survive theres no real point in any of it exceot the moment to moment experiences of life itself.

– Beyond that, life is insane and we’re all nuts to one degree or another. The Left, for all its self proclaimed elitehood takes the simpler path of just going with the “feelings” and willfully ignoring all consequences. Sort of a mental suicide, the ultimate “giving up”. Hardly elite in any way, and certainly defeatist. But thats just the world through the eyes of a 76 year old that lived it hard and real.

– God doesn’t want you to know the “why”, or chances are he would have included that in the operating manual.

Even with all the government scandals, Solyndra, Chevrolet bond holders, IRS, Fast & Furious, DOJ wiretapping, Benghazi, the WaPo idiot leftists still think more government is needed.

I should create an account and start asking liberals if they enjoy taking dates to the DMV, Social Security Administration, etc. After all, since these people worship big government, stands to reason their greatest joy in life is dealing with government.

You’re right, Blake. I shouldn’t be, but I am, astonished at the venom in the letters to different publications regarding any and all aid to the tornado victims. I’ve noticed a new theme emerging, too: there are an insufficient amount of black people who were harmed by the tornadoes, therefore the towns in Oklahoma are racist or maybe the tornadoes were racist. Or something. The fact that there are a tremendous number of Indians here is never mentioned by these race baiters.

I was watching the local news this morning out of Tulsa and they had film of man on the street stuff from Shawnee which was hit on Monday. One of the fellows interviewed was very emotional, but men here don’t cry, so he was kind of gulping and speaking hoarsely about how he’d never asked anyone for anything in his whole life and it was so hard to ask for any help now because that wasn’t the way he was raised. He and his sons were busily sorting through a giant pile of jackstraws that used to be their home and his wife was over helping out at her folks.

Not one person asked what the government was going to do about all this mess.

leigh, under GW, FEMA was roundly criticized, by leftists, for their slow response. Meanwhile, the FEMA response to Sandy was, by all accounts, even worse.

It is unbelievable the world leftists live in. Recent history shows just how crappy the feds are at managing local affairs, yet these deluded fools think more is better.

The evidence is all around them that government sucks, but these people persist in their delusions. I could call these leftists stubborn as a 2×4 mule, but, at least I can get the attention of the mule.

The evidence is all around them that government sucks, but these people persist in their delusions.

– They are not delusional, and deserve no such excuse for their stubborn cling to moronic idea’s. They cling because they know the gov can steal with impunity, so bigger gov for them means much higher chance of free shit, particularly if you’re a minority. Pure cynical selfishness. No delusions.

It’s ridiculous that the dem mayor of New Orleans and their then governor are never blamed for not evacuating the city before Katrina made landfall. Hurricanes give you a much longer heads-up than tornadoes after all. Yet Dubya still got the blame. Same deal with Sandy.

- True enough if you limit the discussion to the hardest of the inner core “true believers”. But they’re not the demographic that got Bumblefuck across the finish line. That demographic is the young turks that don’t have a pot, maybe over-educated, under experienced, with nothing truely bankable to sell. Thats the group that will sell out in a NY minute because they only live for now. They know exactly what their actions will result in, and they do it with relish because they figure if its screw or be screwed then its the way to go. No delusions.

- Actually Leigh the revisionism is even worse than usual. Kate Blanco refused to agree to Bushes attempts to declare martial law for six days AFTER the storm passed. The Coast guard was forced to disobey Federal mandates and go ahead and effect rescues because of Blanco’s actions. The entire mess was made that much worse for a week after because of her stupidity. Some think it was intentional for political gain. Take your pick. As for the Mayor, he was in a moronic league of his own. Bush was a handy diversion for all of them.

I’ve noticed that the kids around here Stand with Rand. At least I see a lot of them in t-shirt’s with Rand’s picture on them. It seems that the GOP (may it rest in pieces) is going to be eclipsed by the small libertarian bench within the party and the TEA Partiers. The establishment GOP consists of old timers like McConnell, McCoot and Miss Lindsey, his pet. The guys with the ideas are our young turks: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Trey Gowdy, and some others whose names are escaping me at the moment.

It was a real fucking avoidable mess, that’s for sure BBH. I remember watching that jagoff, Ray Nagin, take to any microphone that was near him like a remora on a shark to blame away at everyone else but his own stupidity and Blanco’s. The overhead shots of all the leagues of school busses sitting in floodwater should have been a clue bat to the reporters. But who cares about that when you have cannibals in the Superdome? Right, Shep?

- I have to cling to my own beliefs that the upcoming generations are going to see through the cynical short sighted idea of selling your futiure and freedoms for short term minimal junk, but thats just my opinion. Either the fierce American independence is alive and well, and just waiting to spring forth from the good soil or it isn’t.

– We’ll probably get a pretty good idea which it is when we get the results of 2014 and 2016.

I’m hopeful for 2014 and don’t even want to think about 2016 yet. My husband has thrown in the towel and is on the “we’re all doomed!” bandwagon. I can’t go there yet, but he’s lots older than me and maybe he’s right. I’m not going to try to argue him out of it because it messes with ye olde domestic tranquility here at the ranch. Our boys give me hope. If only the girls they know weren’t such dolts, but the boys are discerning fellows and won’t date morons. Or at least not yet.

Abe’s point that you don’t find too many conservative public intellectuals living in the ‘burbs or the boonies of flyover country is an accurate one. Personally I’m not sure there’s anything significant in that. Maybe there is and I just haven’t thought about it.

So-called was a stylistic choice. I could have just as easily, and perhaps better put betters in quotaion marks. Philosophically, I’m committed to the principle of the equal moral worth of all men under the law.

What I had in mind was Lebedoff and Lasch and Sowell. In Oklahoma* regular folk** get on with rebuilding their lives after a disaster. The liberal elites in the credentialed set set about trying to better organize other people’s lives for them.

Put it this way, on the one hand you’ve got people who start cleaning up by putting the flag back up, to the wonderment of the media; and on the other, you’ve got some pretentious git wanting to know why nobody passes a law to make these idiot Okies build the saferooms —presumably because they’re too stupid to think of for themselves without a law to make them.

It was the presumption I trying to mock.

*not just Oklahoma of course

** and all I mean by that is people who aren’t liberal elites themselves or share in their annointed (to borrow from Sowell again) vision of rule by a technocratic/managerial elite.

- Well, in that vein, one of the reasons that America has always been the beacon of hope for the rest of the world is our historic ability to overcome adversity. Now we’ll get to see if that ability includes overcoming mindless diversity.

- Of course if this headlong rush to Kumbaya Utopia continues unabated we can always follow the UK’s example, since that’s worked so well for them, or even better Sweden, and of course the Ultimate in Socialism Utopian constructs, Greese.

*** Besides, conservative public intellectual is probably an oxymoron, in that if you are a conservative intellectual, being public probably isn’t on your to do list. ***

Why is that [conservative intellectuals would eschew public appearance]? Or to say another way, why do you think that might be the case in any way bound to conservative thought as such [if you do so believe], or internally, from within conservatism, so to speak, rather than a possible temporary condition of happenstance reflecting the powers of persecution leveled against them?

I thought of both VDH and Mark Steyn, and I’m not sure either the San Fernando Valley or rural New Hampshire count as flyover country. Probably they do, and that’s just my Upper Midwestern/Northern Plains geocentrism showing.

As to conservative public intellectual being an oxymoron, I don’t think so. Although, I would tend to agree that there aren’t any celebrity conservative public intellectuals

Spotlight, celebrity, public . . . this is getting into mincing territory, looks to me.

Public is for one and all, is the way I’d use the term. It’s open and seeks to be open, assertive and seeks to be assertive. It’s the business of politics to be a matter of controversy, and if a political opinion can’t make its stand in political controversy, in public, it doesn’t seem as though it would be a political opinion in the first place.

Public appearance we can understand as writings in public books (law review as such an example), posts on blogs, speeches before gatherings, or columns in newspapers — it’s just to say there are manifold means by which or in which to appear, and not solely on the tv or the radio.

Abe’s point that you don’t find too many conservative public intellectuals living in the ‘burbs or the boonies of flyover country is an accurate one. Personally I’m not sure there’s anything significant in that. Maybe there is and I just haven’t thought about it.

Why don’t we see public intellectuals much in red places? Maybe because those who promote punditry aren’t interested in red place thinking. Maybe because the smartest red place folks have better things to do than jawjacking, which is to say they prefer applied intelligence to the theoretical sort. I suspect the people in red places know who their really smart neighbors are.

You know what there’s an abundance of? Normal people in normal places wondering how in the hell we got here. Wondering how we took the most visionary founding documents a country has ever known and came to the verge of dumping them for unworkable Marxist drivel. And when they approach an answer, do they see red place intellectuals, who think in places where government acts the way we suppose it ought to? No. They don’t.

Abe, you and Manhattan can go fuck yourselves, and I say that from the ‘burbs well Northeast of you. For now.

Why don’t we see public intellectuals much in red places? Maybe because those who promote punditry aren’t interested in red place thinking. Maybe because the smartest red place folks have better things to do than jawjacking, which is to say they prefer applied intelligence to the theoretical sort.

Getting paid to think deep thoughts is a great gig, if you can get it. But that takes institutional infrastructure (I’m thinking Heritage, AEI, etc.) And that in turn takes surplus wealth. So it’s no accident, as the marxist says, that these types of institutions tend to pop up on or near the eastern seaboard. It’s the oldest and most built-up part of the country.

But boy, the things I could do in Pohdunk, Jesuslandia, with that winning powerball ticket just lying in the gutter waiting for me to pick it up.

Mill, the disciple of Bentham, thought Coleridge was worth reading –much to the distress of the Benthamites. Trilling, a liberal’s liberal, thought the same thing about T.S. Eliot, the Anglo-Catholic traditionalist, and he said so in the Trotskyite Partisan Review

Yeah, but to be truly effective, Jeff needs to start sexually servicing a really wealthy old crone, or otherwise find a way to build an endowment.

Is what I was getting at with my Lotto millions remark.

The flip side, of course, is that money attracts the opportunists as well as the idealists, so, trade-offs.

I wonder if anybody has done an in-depth historical study of the Committees of Correspondence that preceded the Revolution. For that matter, I wonder if there’s enough surviving documentation to do an in-depth study in the first place. Not my field.

Rand Paul (according to the Daily Caller), speaking of Obazm said “I think he’s really losing the moral authority to lead this nation”, and I think Rand Paul has jumped to the terrible assumption Obazm ever had any such moral authority. Why should Paul be so sloppy? Is it flattery at which he aims? But few would be so simple as not to see through such silliness, would they?

I think all Paul means by “moral authority” is credibility or trustworthiness. The rest of it is massaging the message so the media doesn’t jump up and down on his balls for calling the President a lying sack of shit.

If Paul has to delimit a perfectly good expression in that way (which he may well like to do, I don’t know) then that alone would fit the accusation that he’s sloppy. Just apply the plainer truer term, and he’s good to go — but for fuck’s sake don’t use a term that is false on its face.

I’m thinking the deep thoughts done been thought; our constitution is brilliant, capitalism is the bomb, and fucking public intellectual’s overthinking everything is what’s screwing us up.

The problem with modern intellectuals is they don’t think deeply about ideas the public will love and want to adopt, they think deeply of ways to game the system in order to force the world to do their bidding.

You want to begin bringing the country back, first order of business is picking up where Reagan failed. Eliminate the Dept. of Education, which will require the outlawing of public unions as a first step.

Oh, and when I say thinking deeply of ways to game the system in order to force the world to do their bidding, think green energy, electric cars, Obamacare, immigration reform, wars we never seen to win, and on and on. I’d rather live in Sarah Palins world than that of a thousand smartest New Yorkers in history’s world.

I’m thinking the deep thoughts done been thought; our constitution is brilliant, capitalism is the bomb, and fucking public intellectual’s overthinking everything is what’s screwing us up.

Part of Bloom’s argument is that Rousseau and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Freud and Weber are serious thinkers of the highest caliber, and we’ve never quite been able to come to terms with their criticism of Enlightenment rationalism, because it’s just not in our Lockean character.

To the extent that we’re even Lockean’s. Bloom uses that Will Roger’s quote about never meeting a man he (Roger’s) didn’t like to devestating effect. As Pablo suggests, we’re a practical people, not a philosophical people. Which means we’re interested in the short term of what works rather than the intermediate to long term of what’s right (or noble, just etc.).

indians need help the status quo is a brutal ass-rape that leaves them poor ignorant fat and marginalized

Where I come from, those poor ignorant fat marginalized ass-raped indians buy german and italian luxury/sports cars and then run them into the ground by never changing the oil because they get a nice monthly check from their share of the casino profits, and can affod to buy a new one when they break the one they have.

In fairness, that was fifteen to twenty years ago, so maybe they’ve learned to manage their money by now.

But it it wasn’t for indian gaming, there’s now way there would be a Mercedes (or is it BMW? I don’t remember) dealership in tiny little Morton, Minnesota.

Indians own a lot of the tobacco consortiums and all of the smoke shops around here as well as the casinos. They finally got approval to build a shiny new casino in my little town. I guess they made some kind of backroom deal with the Baptists on the city counsel.

- Who among us would not like to practice “misery loves company” given the chance. Life is so much more bearable if you can pretend you’re not the only ugly kid that never gets picked for the teams in dodgeball.

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